A floweret, withered, odorless,
In a book forgot I find;
And already strange reflection
Cometh into my mind.
Bloomed where? When? In what spring?
And how long ago? And plucked by whom?
Was it by a strange hand, was it by a dear hand?
And wherefore left thus here?
Was it in memory of a tender meeting?
Was it in memory of a fated parting?
Was it in memory of a lonely walk
In the peaceful fields, or in the shady woods?
Lives he still? lives she still?
And where is their nook this very day?
Or are they too withered,
Like unto this unknown floweret?
18. But from the love of the individual the growing soul comes in time
to the love of the race; or rather, we only love an individual because
he is to us the incorporation of some ideal. And let the virtue for
which we love him once be gone, he may indeed keep our good will, but
our love for him is clean gone out. This is because the soul in its
ever-upward, heavenward flight alights with its love upon individuals
solely in the hope of finding here its ideal, its heaven realized. But
it is not given unto one person to fill the whole of a heaven-searching
soul. Only the ideal, God alone, can wholly fill it. Hence the next
strain to that of love for the individual is this longing for the ideal,
a longing for what is so vague to most of us, a longing to which
therefore not wholly inappropriately the name has been given of a
longing for the Infinite.
19. And of this longing, Heine has given in eight lines immeasurably
pathetic expression:
"Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh'.
Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand."
Heine has taken the evergreen pine in the cold clime, as the emblem of
this longing, and a most noble emblem it is. But I cannot help feeling
that in choosing a fallen angel, as Pushkin has on the same subject, he
was enabled to give it a zenith-like loftiness and a nadir-like depth
not to be found in Heine.